How can I see how many times a certain link is clicked or how many times a certain file was downloaded?

I think this is particularly interesting if you're offering free downloads, for you to see what people are interested in or for you to test different link styles and placements to see which one is best.

Chapter 1: Statcounter

Chapter 2: Bitly.com

Chapter 3: Click counter and download counter

Chapter 1: Statcounter

As described in the Tracking visitors activity FAQ Statcounter is mainly used to see how many visitors your site has, which pages are the most visited ones, ...

On the left side you also see "Downloads" and if you click on it you will see the 500 most recent downloads.

Chapter 2: Bitly.com

Bitly.com is mainly used to shorten link. So if you have a URL of a page you want to link to or of a file you want to link to perhaps for people to download it just type it in the appropriate box

and hit Shorten. You then get a short link and on the left side of the link you also see how many people clicked the link.

By clicking on the number of clicks you get a lot of numbers, statistics, how many people clicked the link per country, where on which page and so on. You also get the techy looking qrcode image for people to scan it with their smartphone and get redirected to it (useless?).

Of course you will see these stats only if you register an account (free).

Chapter 3: Click counter and download counter

1. Go to this page and download the click counter script

2. Rename the folder you get to ccount

3. Open settings.php in TextWrangler

4. Type in password, URL, change count unique clicks to 1 and save the changes

5. Upload the ccount folder to the root of your server

Entering http://yourdomain.com/ccount/ into your browser will display the login page of the script

6. You then see the following page

Where you can add new links and where you see how many times a link was clicked.

The script is quite minimalistic. There are no fancy stats as in bitly.com but it does its job. And the good thing is that the script resides on your own server.

If you want to display on a page how many times a link was clicked use the following code:

<script language="Javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://yourdomain.com/ccount/display.php"></script>

<span style="color:green;font-weight:bold"><script language="Javascript" type="text/javascript">ccount_display('13');</script></span>

In the first line change yourdomain.com to your domain

In the second line type the link ID number you want to display (here: 13)

Example:

ain't that great? I love it. Of course the number is automatically updated when people click on the link to download the book.

The script is free to use but if you like it I would like you to buy it or donate to the author of the script (see the page where you downloaded the script from). I think it's good practice to pay people who make a good job and really deserve it. Don't you think so?

This FAQ is also discussed in my iWebFAQ.org E-Book (sample)

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